Escaping the Online Discourse to Burning Man, Then Escaping Burning Man

Twitter/X hate is a useful reminder of why people go to Burning Man in the first place.

After a treacherous five-mile hike in the sticky playa mud on Sunday, I got to the highway, hopped on a few different buses and made it home safely from Burning Man.

A lot of readers have written to me to see if I’m OK, or just to ask about the experience of leaving Burning Man at a time when flooding made it impossible to leave by car. I’m not only fine -- I had a blast. I’m excited to get back to work. I have lots of new reporting, and so much more to build out on this Substack. But let me write just a few quick thoughts about the experience.

Over the last few days, Twitter/X has oozed with schadenfreude, with hundreds of thousands of outsiders mocking the calamity at Burning Man with predictable scorn. The platform is filled with viral tweets gleefully ridiculing the “wealthy elites leaving people behind” and the failures of a “libertarian utopia.”

Earlier today, Jacobin, the self-styled socialist magazine, capitalized on the online furor and recirculated an older article decrying Burning Man as a "dark" event in which "high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians" spend a week in the desert creating a society in which "the people who have the most money" make all the decisions.

To anyone familiar with the event, the accusations are laughable. Once you’ve arrived at the festival, everything is free, except for ice. As you walk through Black Rock City -- the makeshift town that Burners build every year – people left and right beg you to come into their camp for free smoothies, freshly baked cookies, or a cocktail. When you go to any party, workshop, lecture, or hangout, you are welcome. Strangers immediately dance with you and exchange high-fives. It’s hard for me, as someone who isn’t particularly extroverted. But the expectation there is a warm embrace of every stranger, and the culture is contagious.

The festival boasts a hippy, anything-goes ethos about drugs, sex, and lifestyle choices, but there are also communal rules rooted in shared responsibility that are followed by nearly all participants. It is a model of the kind of high social trust that progressives often valorize in social-democratic countries. If you see trash, you pick it up. If you find someone who may not be having a good time, even a stranger, you comfort them. You bring plenty of supplies and virtually everyone is ready for anything – even the rain storm. 

In short, Burning Man is a community where intense, personal connectedness is palpable in ways that are rarely imaginable in the United States. It’s an especially stark contrast with the very online media universe, in which people remain huddled on screens and immersed in toxic political polarization, accustomed to existing in balkanized boxes where we are primed to hate each other for no good reason.

I’m not a Burning Man fanatic or frequent attendee. Of course, there are some contradictions and problems with the festival and some cringe. But most of the hate is tiresome and speaks more to the pathologies of the critics than to anything about the event itself. When I first went in 2015, I read tons of criticism of Burning Man and truly expected some kind of Silicon Valley-focused costume party, replete with the very inequality outlined in that Jacobin article. But every long essay I read critiquing the event as a playground for the rich turned out to be completely off base. I met tons of people from all walks of life. Nothing was roped off. The controversies from nearly a decade ago, of ticketed events with models and celebrities, were on the fringes and were very quickly banned once they became public. The few folks who tried to charge for events were basically ejected long ago. 

If anything, it took me a day or two to acclimate to the extreme openness and egalitarian nature. Generally, you have no idea who anyone is, what they do, or what politics they hold. Everyone is welcoming and kind, and no one really cares who you are or what tribe you’re from. There’s no incentive to be mean, aggressive, or to bully. It is everything that online politics is not. 

Yes, it is an expensive event. The tickets this year started at $575, plus a $150 vehicle pass, in addition to several hundred dollars worth of supplies. But even when travel, shelter, and supplies are accounted for, the total cost is not much more than a few weeks of decent NBA tickets, a family visit to Disneyland, or almost any week-long trip abroad. The selective outrage about the price of Burning Man again reflects the insecurities and political fixations of its critics, rather than the reality of the experience. 

And yes, billionaires are part of Burning Man. Some of the biggest parties and fanciest art cars ferrying DJs across the city are backed by very wealthy people. But every camp, small and large, has something to offer. Many of the best experiences were just little tents offering fortune-telling, confession booths, relationship workshops or tea. It’s all a mix and it’s all equally accessible.

We live in an ultra-atomized society, in which every age group is experiencing skyrocketing levels of loneliness. In that vacuum, we seek out meaning, often in online subcultures or political tribes. But rather than bringing us together, these tribes act as a barrier to new experiences and meeting new people. In the online bubble, you see many of these tribes conjuring up a version of Burning Man to hate. It’s what tribal thinking always leads to.

In the real world, and especially online, we are also constantly monitoring each other for perceived wrongspeak and wrongthink, a puritanical instinct that tends to crush free expression and promote conformity. That can be exhausting, and frankly, very boring. People spend lots of money and time going to Burning Man to find belonging and weirdness, to escape from judgment, and just have a carefree good time – even if it's a bit of a short-lived fantasy. Part of the tradition involves adopting a whole new “playa name,” a new identity, just for the week. That’s OK to me, especially in this day and age.

What is the point of all of this? Burning Man was started in 1986 on the beach in San Francisco among friends celebrating the end of summer, with roots in the bohemian movements of the city. It’s transformed over the years and wildly expanded. While it can be tiresome to hear some Burners claim to be saving the world, I don’t think that mentality is very prominent. At the end of the day, it’s just an immersive experience. I’ve made friends from all over the world and from all over the country via Burning Man, and I have some great memories. That’s more than enough for me.

The rain and flooding this year definitely posed new challenges. I freaked out a bit last Friday during the storm. Our friends had planned a big schedule of events that day, and then the rain started. It kept pouring and pouring. One close buddy from our camp pulled out his ham radio and tuned into the emergency broadcast. Anxiety began to swell. As the mud puddles appeared all around us and the piddle paddle of rain transformed into a steady downfall, a sense of despair set in. What if the forecast was right, and it continued raining for the entire weekend and we were trapped until Wednesday? What if the bathrooms overrun? What if no emergency vehicles can make it out?

But not long after that initial flash of fear, we settled down and came together, counting supplies and drinking into the night. The next day, the rain mostly let up, our camp bar resumed, people from all around flooded into our camp. All over, revelers trudged through the mud to keep things going and help one another out. We went out and visited other camps and things were still very festive on Saturday night. Everyone I encountered was in good spirits despite the bad weather. 

By the time most people had calmed down, the news media and social media had erupted into a frenzy, promoting fake stories about Ebola and fist fights over food, along with gleeful predictions of mass suffering. It was sad to see many of the vehicles stuck in the mud, spinning tires, as I made my long hike out. Yet none of the worst predictions or online accusations about total calamity were true. As soon as I got out to the paved road, I met a young man from Hayward, Calif. offering free rides on the back of his truck. Others handed out snacks and water.

But the bizarro online depiction was a helpful distortion window into the universe we had all hoped to escape for a week. And the social media hate, if anything, made me appreciate the opportunity to disconnect for a small period.